POLICY BRIEF • The United Nations and
Environmental Security
Water, Conflict, and Cooperation
Fierce competition for fresh water may
well become a source of conflict and
wars in the future.
Kofi Annan, March 2001
But the water problems of our world
need not be only a cause of tension;
they can also be a catalyst for cooperation....If we work together, a secure and
sustainable water future can be ours.
Kofi Annan, February 2002
W
ater poses both a threat and an
opportunity for the UN system.
Increasing scarcity of clean fresh
water impedes development, undercuts human
health, and plays critical roles along the conflict
continuum between and within states. While
rarely (if ever) starting a war between states,
water allocation is often a key sticking point in
ending conflict and undertaking national and
regional reconstruction and development.
Within states, water scarcity can assume an
increasingly contentious and violent role when,
for example, water-dependent sectors such as
irrigated agriculture can no longer sustain farm-
ALEXANDER
CARIUS,
GEOFFREY
D. DABELKO,
and
AARON T.
WOLF
Alexander Carius is the director of
Adelphi Research in Berlin, Germany, a
public policy research institute on environment, development, and foreign policy. Geoffrey D. Dabelko is the director of
the Wilson Center’s Environmental
Change and Security Project. Aaron T.
Wolf is associate professor of geography
in the Department of Geosciences at
Oregon State University and the director
of the Transboundary Freshwater
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Dispute Database.
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ing livelihoods, leading to destabilizing migration flows. Conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction efforts
ignore water at their peril in key regions of the
world (e.g., Southern and East Africa, including
the Great Lakes region; the Middle East; and
Central, Southeast, and South Asia).
Water has also proven to be a productive
pathway for confidence building, cooperation,
and arguably, conflict prevention. Cooperative
incidents outnumbered conflicts by more than
two to one from 1945-1999 (Wolf, Yoffe, &
Giordano, 2003). The key variable is not
absolute water scarcity, but the resilience of the
institutions that manage water and its associated tensions. In some cases, water provides one
of the few paths for dialogue in otherwise heated bilateral conflicts. In politically unsettled
regions, water is often essential to regional
development negotiations that serve as de facto
conflict-prevention strategies. The UN system
and its partners have ripe opportunities to capitalize on water’s cooperation promise while
undercutting its conflict potential.
Water-Related Violence: What,
Where, and How?
Water-related violence often occurs on the local
rather than international level, and the intensity
of conflict is generally inversely related to geographic scale (Wolf, 1999). Even if international disputes over water-related issues do not typically cause violent conflict, they have led to
interstate tensions and significantly hampered
development, such as along the Nile, Mekong,
Euphrates, Amu Darya, Syr Darya, and Ganges
rivers. And while conflicts often remain local,
they can also impact stability at the national
and regional levels.
The Basins at Risk project’s analytical tool
helps identify areas where hydrological and
political conditions suggest a higher likelihood
of conflict over water (Wolf et al., 2003). Based
on extensive analysis of the world’s 263 international river basins, the project hypothesizes that
“the likelihood of conflict rises as the rate of
change within the basin exceeds the institutional capacity to absorb that change.” Sudden physical changes or reduced institutional capacity are
more conducive to disputes. Key examples
include uncoordinated development of major
projects that affect flow (e.g., dams) in the
absence of a treaty or commission; basins that
suddenly become “internationalized,” as
occurred in post-Soviet Central Asia; and general animosity among parties. This approach provides a set of indicators for monitoring potential
hot spots, thus allowing us to get ahead of the
“crisis curve” and promote institutional capacity
in advance of intractable conflict.
There are three major linkages between conflict and water:
1) Access to adequate water supplies: Conflict
is most likely to occur over water when disputes involve access to water of adequate
quantity and quality. Even when water supplies are not severely limited, allocation of
water among different users and uses (urban
residents and agriculture, for example) can
be highly contested. Degraded water quality,
which can pose serious threats to health and
aggravate scarcity, is also a source of potentially violent disputes. Finally, when water
supplies for broadly irrigated regions decline
either in terms of quantity or quality, those
declines can spur migrations that could
politically destabilize the receiving cities or
neighboring countries.
2) Water, livelihood loss, and civil conflict:
Water’s importance in sustaining human
livelihoods can indirectly link it to conflict.
Water is a basic resource for agriculture,
which is traditionally the largest source of
livelihoods. If this livelihood is no longer
available, people are often forced to search
for job opportunities in the cities or turn to
other, sometimes illicit, ways to make a liv-
ing. Migration—induced by lack of water,
sudden droughts and floods, infrastructure
construction (e.g., dams), pollution disasters, or livelihood loss—can produce tensions between local and incoming communities, especially when it increases pressure on
already scarce resources. And poverty due to
livelihood loss has been identified as a common denominator of the causes of conflict in
most of the civil wars that emerged in Africa,
South Asia, and Latin America during the
last decade (Ohlsson, 2000).
3) Water management and conflict: In most
cases, it is not the lack of water that leads to
conflict, but the inadequate way the resource
is governed and managed. There are many
reasons why water management fails, including lack of adequate water institutions, inadequate administrative capacity, lack of transparency, ambiguous jurisdictions, overlapping
functions, fragmented institutional structures, and lack of necessary infrastructure.
Water management is highly complex and
extremely political. Balancing competing interests over water allocation and managing water
scarcity require strong institutions. A reliable
database, including meteorological, hydrological, and socio-economic data, is a fundamental
tool for deliberate and farsighted management
of water resources. Yet, reliable information is
often difficult to obtain, especially in developing countries. Further, disparities among riparians’ capacity to generate, interpret, and legitimize data can lead to mistrust and thus hinder
cooperative action.
Water management in many countries is also
characterized by overlapping and competing
responsibilities among government bodies.
Disaggregated decision-making often produces
divergent management approaches that serve
contradictory objectives and lead to competing
claims from different sectors. And such claims
are even more likely to contribute to disputes in
countries where there is no formal system of
water-use permits, or where enforcement and
monitoring are inadequate. Controversy also
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THE UNITED NATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY
expert-to-expert (Track II) linkages along the
Jordan or Indus rivers.
Finally, a water peacemaking strategy can
create shared regional identities and institutionalize cooperation on a broader range of issues.
Examples of this dynamic include the institutionalized environmental cooperation around
the Baltic Sea during the Cold War (Helsinki
Commission) and the current cooperation in
post-apartheid Southern Africa through the
Southern African Development Community
(Conca & Dabelko, 2002).
Water as a Pathway to Peace
The United Nations and Water,
Conflict, and Cooperation
Transboundary cooperation around water
issues, which stems from a drive for sustainable development in the face of shared stress,
has a long and successful history. This development imperative—not the fear of conflict
per se—motivates countries to pursue tough,
protracted negotiations such as the Nile Basin
Initiative (NBI).
Aggressively pursuing a water peacemaking
strategy can provide dividends beyond water for
stakeholders. It can build trust and serve as an
avenue for dialogue when parties are stalemated
on other issues. Transboundary water institutions have proven resilient, even as conflict is
waged over other issues (e.g., the “Picnic Table
Talks” between Jordan and Israel, Mekong
Committee, and Indus River Commission).
This strategy can also establish habits of cooperation among states, some with little experience,
such as the states in the Kura-Araks basin in the
Caucasus, or the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union.
Water can also be a key point in negotiating
the end of a conflict, even if water did not precipitate it. While water did not cause the wars
between India and Pakistan, for example, an
updated agreement on the Indus River has
played a central role in recent bilateral negotiations to end the conflict. In addition, peacemaking through water issues can forge peopleto-people links, as demonstrated by the Good
Water Makes Good Neighbors programs of the
NGO Friends of the Earth Middle East or
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often arises when management decisions are
formulated without sufficient participation by
local communities and water users, thus failing
to take into account local rights and practices.
Protests are especially likely when the public
suspects that water allocations are diverting
public resources for private gain or when water
use rights are assigned in a secretive and possibly corrupt manner, as demonstrated by the
violent confrontations in 2000 following the
privatization of the water utility in
Cochabamba, Bolivia.
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Gaps
Water is a powerfully unifying resource, but
because of its centrality to human life and our
ecosystem, its management is generally diffused
among the world’s agencies and institutions. The
UN is no exception: water-related expertise is
spread throughout the system, including such
bodies as UN Development Programme
(UNDP), UN Environment Programme
(UNEP), United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF), Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), and the UN Economic Commissions,
along with partners like the World Bank and the
Global Environment Facility.2 The fragmentation of this impressive expertise has historically
prevented the UN from taking the lead in waterrelated conflict mitigation. To redress this problem, the UN system must integrate policy and
coordinate its extensive but diffuse expertise on
water, conflict, and cooperation across its bodies.
International waters: The UN should
develop an integrated, systematic program of
preventive water diplomacy based on modified
versions of the World Bank and Global
Environment Facility frameworks. This program would (1) bolster early warning for
regions with potential for water conflicts (conducted by, for example, UNEP’s Division of
Early Warning and Assessment); (2) develop a
systematic program for enhancing institutional
capacity between nations, including reconciling
national legal frameworks (perhaps led by
FAO’s Development Law Service); and (3)
craft, by unifying existing expertise, a “one-stop
shop” for developing programs to enhance
cooperation (such as UNESCO’s recently
launched Water Cooperation Facility). All these
efforts should integrate traditional conflict-prevention bodies, such UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis
Prevention and Recovery, in both the design
and use of these products and capacities.
The UN must address a number of gaps
that impede the implementation of this systematic, integrated program. First, only a small
number of experienced water-dispute facilitators are viewed as truly neutral. The World
Bank has a few, but they are in short supply at
other UN bodies. The UN system should
rebuild its ability by recruiting and training
facilitators in hydrology, international law,
regional history, and conflict prevention (the
Universities Partnership for Transboundary
Waters offers a model for developing and executing this training).
Second, UN conveners and facilitators, and
their bilateral funders, must be willing to support long processes without requiring instant or
easily measurable results. The World Bank’s 20year commitment to the NBI is an exemplary
model, which the bank is reproducing in other
African basins. The UN should extend this
model beyond Africa and encourage disparate
UN bodies to cooperate as equal partners.
Third, to achieve sustainable implementation,
the UN must find ways to include all stakeholders throughout the process, in order to offset the secrecy that traditionally surrounds
high-level negotiations. Unlike the NBI, this
should not wait until state-to-state agreements
have been reached.
Finally, the UN should seek to strengthen the
capacity of parties to negotiate contested water
issues. Disparities in capacity and knowledge
have often led to mistrust between riparian
countries, hindering cooperative action.
Strengthening the negotiating skills of less powerful riparians can therefore help prevent con-
Headwaters of the Nile River, Uganda (Credit: Inger Andersen)
flict, as can strengthening their capacity to generate and authorize relevant data (Turton,
2003). A hydrological database that is accepted
by all stakeholders is essential for any joint management efforts, as it builds trust and enables
water-sharing parties to make decisions based on
the same understanding of the situation.
While pursuing this integrated program, the
UN must avoid falling back on media-friendly
but historically inaccurate scare tactics like
warning of impending “water wars” between
states. This is not the appropriate frame for these
issues because (1) most organized violence from
water conflict occurs not between states, but at
the subnational and local levels or between sectors; (2) the “water wars” angle discourages the
engagement of key developmental and environmental partners in favor of security actors; (3) it
does not easily lead to a program of action for
conflict prevention and human development;
and (4) we do not need to use violent conflict to
prove that water is a matter of life and death.
Indeed, by directly or indirectly contributing to
two million to three million deaths annually,
unsafe drinking water poses a primary challenge
to human security, as recognized by both the
Millennium Development Goals and the
Johannesburg Plan of Implementation.
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State-to-State Water Interactions in Transboundary Basins,
1946-1999
International
Water Treaty
157
Support
1071
Neutral Act
96
Hostility
Formal War
507
0
Source: Adapted from Wolf, Yoffe, & Giordano (2003)
Intranational level: Many countries need
stronger internal policies to regulate water use
and to enable equal and sustainable management of their water resources. The UN should
help strengthen the institutional and legal
frameworks for managing water resources at the
national level. To ensure that these national
frameworks are implemented, the local level—
at which water is actually used—requires more
assistance (e.g., developing management institutions on the catchment level and institutionalizing community-based cooperative management mechanisms).
Regardless of the level of analysis, building
capacity for integrated water management and
conflict prevention is a critical role for the UN.
Developing the human, technical, and administrative capacity to generate and analyze data, to
develop sustainable management plans, and to
implement these plans is necessary to enable
water institutions to fulfill their management
tasks and to prevent water-related disputes over
the long term. Building capacity in conflictmanagement techniques, such as mediation and
facilitation, as well as in stakeholder participa-
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tion, helps mitigate conflicts and prevent disputes from emerging during decision-making.
Options
What form would a systematic, integrated program of preventive diplomacy and water take?
Since most initiatives dealing with water, conflict, and cooperation are substantially underfunded and rarely reach beyond the project
level, the challenge for the international community is to create an obvious earmark for
international water conflict and cooperation
funds, as the Global Fund is for HIV/AIDS,
tuberculosis, and malaria. Such a fund could
utilize water to build confidence and prevent
conflict, assess water facilitation skills to match
capacity and opportunities, and reduce the
number of overlapping and duplicative bilateral
approaches.
As part of its program, the UN should create a forum to identify and articulate the needs
of Southern stakeholders for transboundary
water management, dispute resolution, and
conflict transformation. Such forums as the
World Commission on Water, Peace, and
Security or the Water Cooperation Facility
have already been proposed. The UN should
also seek to integrate existing networks and
platforms that address water and security linkages in the South.
In addition, water venues such as the 13th
Commission on Sustainable Development in
2005, UN-Water, and the World Water
Assessment Programme must move beyond
technical management questions and situate
water and development issues in a larger peace
and security context, integrating lessons from
ongoing efforts like UNESCO’s Potential
Conflict to Cooperation Potential (PCCP) program and UNEP’s Post-Conflict Assessment
Unit.3 By collaborating with these water
forums, UN bodies focused on conflict could
support the environmental priorities outlined
in the Secretary-General’s 2003 interim report
on prevention of armed conflict (United
Nations, 2003).
Conclusion
By establishing a program of preventive diplomacy focused on water, the UN could coordinate its extensive but diffuse expertise. Such a
program would assess basins at risk and bolster
the early-warning process for regions with conflict potential. The program would also
enhance institutional capacity between nations
(by reconciling national legal frameworks over
water issues, for example) and craft a “one-stop
shop” with tools to develop programs that
cooperation.
encourage
transboundary
Through a Global Fund for Water—with special emphasis on understanding the Southern
perspective and integrating conflict prevention
units—the UN could improve water management and facilitation skills, reduce duplicate
efforts, and use water to build confidence and
prevent conflict.
Notes
1. This background paper builds on a policy brief
on water and conflict commissioned by the Office of
Conflict Management and Mitigation in the Bureau
for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance
of the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID); see Kramer (2004). For more
information on USAID’s Office of Conflict
Management and Mitigation, visit
http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/
cross-cutting_programs/conflict/.
2. UN programs on water include the following:
• The Global Environment Facility (a partnership
between the World Bank, UNDP, and UNEP) has an
extensive program on international waters; see
http://www.gefweb.org/.
• UNDP, through its program in Sustainable Water
Management, developed an extensive toolkit for efficient water use and shepherded the Global Water
Partnership; see http://www.undp.org/water/
resource.html for more information. Since 1999, it has
worked with the World Bank in an International
Waters Partnership to “seek complimentarity in support of management of transboundary fresh water
resources” (http://www.undp.org/seed/water/
region/partner.htm). UNDP’s Transboundary River
Basin Initiative (TRIB) aims to foster inter-riparian
dialogue to strengthen emerging basin institutions, and
is currently providing focused support in the Mekong,
Niger, Rio Frio, and Senegal basins.
• UNESCO’s International Hydrologic Programme
(http://www.unesco.org/water/ihp/index.shtml) is now
beginning its seventh cycle. More recently, UNESCO
coordinated the World Water Assessment Programme,
designed to assess the state of the world’s water
resources (http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap). For
international waters, UNESCO launched its Potential
Conflict to Cooperation Potential (PCCP) program,
designed specifically to collect, assess, and disseminate
the world’s experience in sharing international waters
(http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/pccp/index.shtml).
It is investigating the possibility of a Water
Cooperation Facility to help stakeholders manage
international water disputes.
• UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and
Assessment (http://www.unep.org/dewa) provides early
warning of environmental change; its mandate is to
“help increase the capacity of governments to use environmental information for decision-making and action
planning for sustainable human development.”
• The World Bank is the lead agency in water
resources development for poverty alleviation in the
developing world; see http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/
ESSD/ardext.nsf/18ByDocName/
WaterResourcesManagement for more information.
Through its regional desks and its International Waters
Window, it has developed a comprehensive program
for the management of international basins, including
legal and political frameworks.
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• The FAO Development Law Service and various
UN Economic Commissions—notably the Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
(http://www.eclac.cl) and the Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and the Pacific
(http://www.unescap.org)—have taken the lead in
building legal capacity for water-related issues, both
within nations and internationally. In addition, the
International Court of Justice has decided on one case
regarding international waterways, and the Permanent
Court of Arbitration has recently broadened its expertise to include the arbitration of environmental disputes.
3. For a summary of PCCP’s actions and recommendations to the Ministerial Conference of the Third
World Water Forum in May 2003, see PCCP’s From
Potential Conflict to Co-operation Potential: Water for
Peace brochure at http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/
pccp/pdf/brochure_2.pdf
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